An Antinomian Dream Grimoire

This book is an antinomian dream grimoire.

 

Oneiromancy, night wandering, mythic dreaming – by any name, dream magic is the art of traveling to the world of myth and wonder in dreams or half-dreams.

 

The things you do there, the quests you experience there, and the riddles you answer there are up to you. Your dreams are your own dreams, although some dreams are shared.

 

Nothing in this book should be taken literally. Nothing should be taken as a metaphor either.

 

Miracles and magic happen every single day, but dream magic offers something much more wonderful than power – a secret that waits beyond dream and death.

 

I step outside. It’s true, perhaps- the years

Have folded me, transmuted me, and made

A different man. The mix of light and shade

 

With which I started is, no doubt, the same

And yet the shape is altered. I have come

So far, this time, from where I started from

 

It feels like transmigration. And my self

Can’t quite recall the self it used to be.

I look up, feeling old and lost, and see

 

A sky of midnight blue. The clouds roll past.

The dead leaves whisper. In the rising wind

Are hints of what I thought I’d left behind.

 

I used to know a way out. That’s a truth,

Though not a fact, exactly. There’s a feat-

You don’t ignore the facts. You merely cheat.

 

And still they call me – shadows from the fire

That burns behind the door. The dark, red wine

Of knowing how to walk the borderline.

 

I turn, and go inside. Tonight I’ll dream

And slip through boundaries, past seas of glass

And mountains hot as blood and dead as ash.

 

Prometheus and I, we share a knack

For abstract theft. And though it’s been too long,

Still, “Whom the gods destroy.” You know the song.

 

– from The Book of Onei, Part 1: The Art of Night Wandering

Image by Frantisek Kupka